Students hope to represent U.S. in Robot Olympiad

Judge Mike Dobbyn, 47, of Hamtramck, Mich., inspects various robots before competition at the World Robot Olympiad at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Mich., on Saturday.(Photo: Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press)

"There's like this one moment when everything comes together for the first time. It's a feeling you get when something you made works correctly," said Pandey, 17, as he stood near his team's robot Saturday at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield. "It's worth doing over and over again."

Pandey and his teammate, Rohan Wagle, also 17, were competing to be one of the nine teams selected to represent the United States in the World Robot Olympiad in Sochi, Russia, in November. The event marked the first U.S. national championship for the Olympiad, which had its start in Singapore in 2004.

The teams competing Saturday, made up of about 85 students from California, Illinois, New York and Michigan, were tasked with creating robots that could gather and assemble rocket parts or help humans complete tasks in space. The competition was to have wrapped up Saturday, with the judges' results expected to be posted at http://wroboto.us/.

Pandey and Wagle, who have been programming computers since age 10, built their Quasimotor robot — they said it looks like a hunchback — in one week using a combination of Legos, a Web camera and a small computer. The shoe box-size robot that they built for about $390 is designed to collect trash.

Arya Prasad, left, and Sattvik Basarkod from the team RoboGeek fix a part of their robot that broke right before the competition at the World Robot Olympiad.(Photo: Eric Seals, Detroit Free Press)

Differences from home in the lighting were causing some problems for Quasimotor's image processing, they said, as the machine rolled across the floor of a large black box to grasp a foam ball in its mechanical pincer. The goal was to lift the ball and bring it back to the center of the box.

Nearby, Sabrina Law and Juno Lee, both 17 of New York, discussed their team's Telerobotics Experiment Facilitator, a computer-controlled arm designed to move back and forth and grip items used in experiments in space. The robot, which their team, Apollo 17, directed using a video game controller, would allow scientists on the ground to conduct experiments that astronauts now have to do.

"You can't turn an astronaut into a scientist in a few weeks," Lee said, noting that it wastes time and money.

The team members had studied how experiments were conducted on the International Space Station in preparation for building their robot.

C.J. Chung, a professor of math and computer science at Lawrence Tech, organized the competition and said he was pleased with the turnout for the first year of what he expects to be an annual competition.

"Our country needs many more people with technology knowledge and skills, and student competitions like the WRO can help us achieve that goal. Robotics is fun for these students because what they create actually comes alive," Chung said in a news release.